Talk:WMF UX Improvement Effort

pre-beta1 testing

• installing pre-beta1 over alpha8 seems to empeach further indexing process (reported by Tomasz)
• bad rand 0-20 if less than 20 results available (reported by Tomasz) Fixed Kelson 21:10, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
• bold search keywords in the snippets (reported by Tomasz)
• implementing crtl+g (command+ on OSX) for search next in search in place (reported by Tomasz)
• searching should be able to match to titles which differ only in case (reported by Kaldari)

pre-beta1 testing by Nikhil Sheth on Windows 7 OS

Conditions: Windows 7, Was using Kiwix + Wikipedia For Schools portable till now, have previously opened and indexed wikipedia en,hi,gu,mr in this and moved the profile folder to another drive. (see http://nikhilsheth.blogspot.com/2011/02/changing-profileindex-location-for.html for details). Downloaded and unzipped http://tmp.kiwix.org/tmp/kiwix-0.9-pre-beta1-win.zip and ran /kiwix/kiwix.exe (autorunner working good, but I haven't checked the installer.)

Searching: on typing a word and pressing Enter, instead of sidebar we now have a web-search-like results page.

1. Under each link I only get "0 KB (0 words)" instead of any useful data, maybe because this is still using the old index created by the last version, but I advise someone check it out.

2. There are 20 search results per page. I feel this may hinder seeing result 21 onwards. What basis is used to order the search results - is it first-hit-first-serve or is there a ranking method? I know it can't be as efficient as a google ranking, so wondering if we might be hindering searching through the articles by limiting results.

3. For some reason I miss the search sidebar. I would previously find an exact article and go to it, but also have a list at the side where I could see suggestions for something related. Eg: Physics. I could then browse from one to another with a click. Now I'm directly taken to an article if I click on the auto-suggest option, and directly taken to search if I press enter or press the search button. I have to go back to search if I want to go to another article instead of just clicking on the side. So I feel like we've gone from more options to less options.

4. In English version, the tooltip for the Search in Page button is still only "Search" and it can be misleading, users might press this button at the near left of the search bar instead of the one at the far right which they should if they're searching for an article.

5. Top menu > Tools > integrity check : clicking on it froze my Kiwix and I had to terminate it!

6. Major bug : Search results are 20 per page and there are links to 10 pages. We cannot go beyond the 200th search result even when it states there are over 200 results! Plus, when it crosses 1000 results, a decimal point instead of the (in English) regular comma is used, as if the total is a decimal fraction. example: Top line on page 10 of search:galaxy : "Results 180-200 of 1.103 for galaxy"

7. We have to calculate from the top line to guess which search page we're on. Eg: Results 120-140 .. means I'm on page7. There is no information of page number, no next page / previous page link so if I came back here after seeing an article, it's a bit harder to guess which was the last or the next page I want to go to.

8. Zoom In shortcut key Ctrl+ '+' doesn't work here. Zoom Out Ctrl+ '-' and original zoom Ctrl+ 0 works.

9. If we're searching using capital letters, then the auto-suggest doesn't function. Also if a character in the target article has an uppercase char somewhere after the first, then putting it in lowercase also removes the auto-suggest. But then the main search is completely case insensitive. Eg: typing "taj mahal" shows Taj Mahal in the auto-suggest right till the space, but as soon as I type m it disappears.

10. On entering two words and searching, it returns results that will have one or both the words. Searching for 'angelina humanist' - either without or with the single quotes - returns results that have one word or the other or both. But use double quotes and you get AND results - only pages that have both the words. This is good so far. But what do you do if you want to search for a phrase with exact order of words? Eg: A search for a line from the Ulysses poem "Of all the western stars, until I die" (using double quotes) Does not return the Ulysses (poem) article in the first page.

11. It may be nice if the text typed in the search bar stayed there instead of being wiped out, if in case we want to go back up and tweak it. Like, in Firefox, what I've typed in search bar stays there.

12. This is just an extreme test : for zero results, with sample search string 'rtgrtrt', should there be a message saying "no results found for rtgrtrt" , or should it just give a popup (no, too jarring!) or something and not browse away from the article we are currently reading? Right now it shows a blank search results page with the line "Results 0-20 of 0 for rtgrtrt".

13. Pressing Escape key when typing in search bar is currently the same as pressing Enter. Previously with Search bar being used this was harmless, but now it takes us away from our current page. We might want to cancel our search instead of going ahead with it.

14. Quite a large amount of screen real estate being wasted in search results. Could we render it in a table of 2 columns instead? Then maybe more search results per page can be accommodated.

Not all of these are serious bugs and some are just quirks, but I thought I better be exhaustive in reporting. But I feel no.6 needs urgent attention. Regards, Nikhilsheth 11:27, 1 April 2011 (UTC)